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It's Not News, It's Fark
Posted by
samzenpus
on Wed May 30, 2007 01:27 PM
from the all-spin-zone dept.
from the all-spin-zone dept.
"In It's Not News, It's Fark, Drew Curtis takes a critical look at the mass media. He promises to examine why the news is often not news at all, to look at the fear mongering, the cyclical nature of the news and the fluff that is passed off as important. Drew breaks down these not-news stories into 8 separate categories and gives examples, along with user comments from Fark. Unfortunately, 230 of the books 278 pages (including the index) are used for these examples. What time is spent talking about the media and the advertisement model it is built on, is insightful a bit cynical and very brief." Read below for the rest of the review.
The book starts off with a brief Fark history lesson. What Drew did before Fark. Its first incarnation and how it got to be what it is today. The author then gives us an outline of the different types of news stories that he considers not newsworthy. Drew points out that since most news is brought to you by an entity that makes its money selling ads, the more eyes watching those ads the better. History has shown that nothing attracts eyes like fluff, fear and stretching the truth. There is a reason why there are so many tabloids in the checkout lane.
The first type of news story Drew covers is what he calls, 'Media Fearmongering'. Everything from finding bacteria on your keyboard, terrorists in your home town to animal attacks. This is the most easily recognized type of non-story.
We then move on to, 'Unpaid Placement Masquerading as Actual Article'. This includes most surveys, new words in the dictionary and all things publicity stunt related. Everything you'd read in the 'Lifestyles' section of the newspaper.
Next is, 'Headline Contradicted by Actual Article'. Misleading headlines to outright lies are addressed. Drew makes the point here that the people who run these stories often realize that they are misleading at best but know that they will generate traffic.
'Equal Time for Nutjobs' covers Noah's ark being discovered, conspiracy theories and a guy who thinks the garden of Eden and Atlantis are in Florida. The crazier the claim the better.
Then we have 'The Out-of-context Celebrity Comment'. Why do we care what someone who pretends to be someone else for a living, has to say about Nuclear proliferation? Who knows but we sure do.
Drew next looks at 'Seasonal Articles' . The amount of money lost due to a fall in productivity because of the Super Bowl, inspecting your Halloween candy, and traffic spikes during holiday weekends. All of these stories should look familiar.
The next chapter is, 'Media Fatigue'. How do you know when a big story has just about run its course? Wait for the stories about whether or not the media has given it enough attention or if they've gone too far.
'Lesser Media Space Fillers' covers everything that couldn't fit into one of the other categories as well as some of Drew's personal observations of what type of stories tend to get the most coverage.
Each one of the chapters has a collection of Fark comments after every example story. The comments seem to be chosen at random and are frankly extraneous. The only reason I can think of to include them is that someone in marketing wanted to tie the book more closely to Fark.
The final chapter of the book is by far the most interesting to read and only 14 pages long. This is the wrap up of the problem as Drew sees it and what he thinks the mass media should be doing instead. His ideas are well reasoned and in my opinion spot on. As long as the media is driven by advertising they will walk the line of responsible, informative journalism and outrageousness as close to outrageousness as they can and still be taken seriously by a majority of consumers.
My criticism of this book is that almost the whole thing is just a list of Fark stories. If you've read Fark you've read 90% of this book. It would have been more interesting if the book was an actual discussion of the shortcomings of the mass media, why it is in the place it's in and what could be done to change it. Those topics are covered but in such a brief way that they almost seem like an afterthought.
If you like reading Fark and for some reason you want to read a collection of Fark stories and a few comments in a non-computer screen format you will love this book. If you want to read about how the mass media works and some thoughts on how it could be better you'll love 50 pages of this book.
You can purchase It's Not News, It's Fark: How Mass Media Tries to Pass Off Crap as News from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
The first type of news story Drew covers is what he calls, 'Media Fearmongering'. Everything from finding bacteria on your keyboard, terrorists in your home town to animal attacks. This is the most easily recognized type of non-story.
We then move on to, 'Unpaid Placement Masquerading as Actual Article'. This includes most surveys, new words in the dictionary and all things publicity stunt related. Everything you'd read in the 'Lifestyles' section of the newspaper.
Next is, 'Headline Contradicted by Actual Article'. Misleading headlines to outright lies are addressed. Drew makes the point here that the people who run these stories often realize that they are misleading at best but know that they will generate traffic.
'Equal Time for Nutjobs' covers Noah's ark being discovered, conspiracy theories and a guy who thinks the garden of Eden and Atlantis are in Florida. The crazier the claim the better.
Then we have 'The Out-of-context Celebrity Comment'. Why do we care what someone who pretends to be someone else for a living, has to say about Nuclear proliferation? Who knows but we sure do.
Drew next looks at 'Seasonal Articles' . The amount of money lost due to a fall in productivity because of the Super Bowl, inspecting your Halloween candy, and traffic spikes during holiday weekends. All of these stories should look familiar.
The next chapter is, 'Media Fatigue'. How do you know when a big story has just about run its course? Wait for the stories about whether or not the media has given it enough attention or if they've gone too far.
'Lesser Media Space Fillers' covers everything that couldn't fit into one of the other categories as well as some of Drew's personal observations of what type of stories tend to get the most coverage.
Each one of the chapters has a collection of Fark comments after every example story. The comments seem to be chosen at random and are frankly extraneous. The only reason I can think of to include them is that someone in marketing wanted to tie the book more closely to Fark.
The final chapter of the book is by far the most interesting to read and only 14 pages long. This is the wrap up of the problem as Drew sees it and what he thinks the mass media should be doing instead. His ideas are well reasoned and in my opinion spot on. As long as the media is driven by advertising they will walk the line of responsible, informative journalism and outrageousness as close to outrageousness as they can and still be taken seriously by a majority of consumers.
My criticism of this book is that almost the whole thing is just a list of Fark stories. If you've read Fark you've read 90% of this book. It would have been more interesting if the book was an actual discussion of the shortcomings of the mass media, why it is in the place it's in and what could be done to change it. Those topics are covered but in such a brief way that they almost seem like an afterthought.
If you like reading Fark and for some reason you want to read a collection of Fark stories and a few comments in a non-computer screen format you will love this book. If you want to read about how the mass media works and some thoughts on how it could be better you'll love 50 pages of this book.
You can purchase It's Not News, It's Fark: How Mass Media Tries to Pass Off Crap as News from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
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Don't buy it (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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Re:Modded by someone who doesn't know Fark (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
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Re:Modded by someone who doesn't know Fark (Score:4, Insightful)
I see your "Get moderators attention to fix egregious moderation" and raise you one pedantry: they call it a cliche on Fark
Parent
Brittany's Hair and Other Fluff (Score:4, Funny)
2 cents
QueenB.
Parent
It's not news... (Score:4, Insightful)
I like Fark and all, but it's getting a little ridiculous lately, especially with the changing away from the old days of naughtiness that alas, are gone...
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
The redesign is ugly. Load times are (still) twice as long as before the site change (back-end fixes my rear end!). Fark isn't what it was 1 year ago, and that's a bad thing.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
My main reason for not reading Digg is that it is goddamn ugly.
Good job there, Fark.
Every single change that they've made in the past 1.5-2 years has been for the worse.
/ Has not gotten over it.
fark's programmers can't (Score:3, Informative)
And no, that isn't mea
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You forget then, about the days pre-naughtiness.
I haven't seen the book, so I don't know what history is presented in it, but the increased levels of naughtiness didn't start 'til mid/late 2000, when Fark got mentioned in Playboy.
Disclaimer : I used to be an admin (Joe) on Fark from 1999 'till about May 2000.
Re:It's not news... (Score:5, Funny)
[insert a cleverly-captioned cat picture here]
Parent
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Re:It's not news... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:It's not news... (Score:5, Interesting)
That's OK, people are allowed to grow and change.
And from what I can tell, it's a dead-on take on the mass media.
If we can finally break some of the spell that the media has on nearly everyone in this country, we might be able to actually make some changes and avoid the disaster that's surely ahead for us the way we're going. We might even be able to demonstrate why the whole "Liberal Media" meme is pure bullshit.
If you look at the last 5 years, and investigate the way this fucked-up administration has used the media to advance the worst possible agenda for this country, it makes your hair stand on end. All the times, for example, that the administration would leak a bogus story, which the media would run, then Dick Cheney would go on TV and say "see, the media agrees with us" because they ran the bogus story that Cheney himself leaked in the first place, and the way they've "played the refs" by convincing everyone that the entire media is part of a vast liberal conspiracy in order to get people to stop believing in facts.
"A War on Truth" is the best way I've seen it put.
The people behind Fark are more insightful than most, so they stand a good chance of being part of the solution by exposing what's going on. So the jokes aren't quite as dirty any more... Oh well.
Parent
Re:It's not news... (Score:5, Insightful)
Obviously, you've never read the fark forums.
I dont see how fark suddenly has this reputation for being media savvy. They were the biggest supporters of the Iraq war, linking to all these right wing op-ed pieces supporting and casting a blind eye to any naysayers (if not outright calling them cowards). While the rest of us were hearing the dissent and how painfully obvious there werent going to be any WMs foundD in Iraq from NPR, the farkers were going crazy over MSNBC and Foxnews and LGF and Rush Limbaugh. Yeah, when i think of media-savvy, I dont think fark.
Parent
Re:It's not news... (Score:5, Insightful)
Damn, where are my mod points?
The endless pro-war crap was sickening. Then there was a thread of jokes about killing Iraqis. I posted a photo that had been on the front page of the newspapers (even in the US), showing an injured Iraqi child, to try and point out the reality they were joking about. Result: I got banned.
Fark is not insightful. Fark is not a free speech zone; it's heavily censored by anonymous moderators with no accountability, which is always a recipe for abuse. No, Fark is simply a way for Drew to make money out of content supplied by other people, and it sounds as though this book is exactly the same.
(I still read it for the links, but via a scraper which turns it into headline plus link to story, bypassing the discussion threads and the rest of the site entirely.)
Parent
A few of us have upped and left (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:It's not news... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:It's not news... (Score:4, Informative)
Seen a Boobies link lately? Not on the main page you haven't.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Is that a clumsily spelled variant of Amateur, or a clumsily spelled variant of Immature?
Slightly more seriously, at least some of the posters at Slashdot know what they're talking about - I've learnt stuff about science/programming here, mainly due to links being posted in comments. I've learnt absolutely nothing from anything posted in any Fark comments. (I used to read Kuro5hin, but it turned out that there both the comments and the articles themselves were no better than you'd see on any b
Didn't you get what you paid for? (Score:5, Insightful)
Then again, if you were really looking for an insightful analysis of centralized media, maybe your time would have been better spent reading Marshall McLuhan [barnesandnoble.com] or Noam Chomsky [barnesandnoble.com] than Drew Curtis.
Just a passing thought...
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"My criticism of this book ... (Score:5, Funny)
You'll get over it.
It's not a book review, it's Slashdot. (Score:5, Funny)
But I did. And lo and behold it's a typical Slashdot "review", consisting of ten paragraphs summarizing each chapter individually followed with "I thought this book sucked/ruled because...". My criticism of this "review" is that almost the whole thing is just a list of the chapters.
If this was a book review for an elementary class you might slide by with a B, but otherwise you get a D.
Ugh, Slashdot book review comments (Score:5, Funny)
But I did. And lo and behold it's a typical "Slashdot 'review'" "comment", consisting of three paragraphs (if you can call them that!) criticizing the article generally, then specifically criticizing it, then summarizing with a snarky grade-school analogy.
If this was a comment on Fark, you might slide by with a "You suck," but otherwise you get a "goatse.cx link".
Parent
Complete the cycle!!! (Score:2, Funny)
Necessary Illusions (Score:4, Interesting)
Short version: the media companies have trained themselves to avoid conflict with the powers that be. The powers that be hardly need to come down on media anymore. These days if you see a news story regarding the powers that be coming down on the media - it's fluff.
Long version: it's Chomsky - you'll have to read it for yourself. Unless anyone else wants to elaborate...
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From a talk at Z Media Institute June 1997
By Noam Chomsky
Part of the reason why I write about the media is because I am interested in the whole intellectual culture, and the part of it that is easiest to study is the media. It comes out every day. You can do a systematic investigation. You can compare yesterday's version to today's version. There is a lot of evidence about what's played up and what isn't and the way things are structured.
Re:Necessary Illusions (Score:4, Insightful)
He's one of those guys that heavily criticizes the USA, but still seems to admire it. Constructive criticism as opposed to the destructive type we usually get in the media.
As for free speech, he refuses to even take legal action when someone libels him, so I'd say he favors free speech.
I dunno. Even after being aware of him since my teens, sometimes I'm still not sure what to make of the guy.
Parent
FSOW (Score:3, Informative)
Libertarian Socialist [wikipedia.org]
News is what someone doesn't want published (Score:5, Insightful)
All else is publicity.
It's a big issue, ignoring this commercial for "Fark" (which I hadn't heard mentioned in years). There are very few US newspapers left with much news. The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal are about it.
The San Jose Mercury News used to be one of the last remaining local papers with real reporting, but since Knight-Ridder sold it to some suburban throwaway publisher, it's had very little real content. Most of the reporters are gone.
The real test is this: did the story originate with a press release or a press conference? If it did, it's publicity. Take a printed newspaper and mark the non-wire-service ads for which this is not the case. There won't be many such stories. In some papers, there won't be any.
they still have human interests stories (Score:3, Interesting)
You're forgetting about all the "human interest" stories that they churn out to help sell newspapers and airtime.
Those are stories without a press release or a press conference. They mostly originate from police reports. Every local paper has a crew ("reporters" is too complimentary) whose job it is to fashion police reports into stories (if it bleeds, it leads).
The other source that I'm seen is stories that get picked up by to local newspapers that first appeared in school newspapers or club newsletters.
slashdot farked black hole of unintentional DDoS (Score:4, Insightful)
It used to be a fun low IQ flamewar filled insight into the minds of folks who would argue the relative hotness and sharp-kneed attributes of any female media celebrity. Some of the threads were freaking hilarious and definitely made my difficult work days a little easier.
In my opinion Fark has made some terrible decisions lately: Fark "TV", terrible redesign without any user feedback, increasing censorship and more paid links. I hated the decision, but it's gone from my bookmarks.
Makes me remember my love for
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I still read fark daily for news, but lately it has felt completely sold out.
1) Censoring of a NUMBER. I even posted a huge base-10 number created by me pounding the keypad... it was deleted.
2) Censoring of boobies in threads. There was a
I smell a sellout to Google or someone (Score:2)
Fark: cancerous meme source of the net (Score:5, Funny)
Some of you guys are very good at making it sound like you know what you are talking about. But trust me.... You don't. I think you just want to make yourself sound smart, when in reality you don't know what you are talking about. This is how bad info gets passed around. If you don't know about the topic....Don't make yourself sound like you do. Cuz some slashdotters believe anything they hear.
Yup. (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Fearmongering, Contradiction, and Ads (Score:2)
It's not Fark (Score:4, Interesting)
Drew Curtis' shark jumping dot com (Score:4, Informative)
Good subject (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem that I see in the media, that hits home to most
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It sounds like this book could be included within its own subject matter.
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To be even more fair ... (Score:5, Insightful)
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